


Eros

by chaos_harmony



Series: we were born to make history [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, Ice Skating, M/M, Yuri on Ice - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 04:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9217961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaos_harmony/pseuds/chaos_harmony
Summary: She hears the bustle of the city, distant. She hears wind whispering through the bare-branched trees. She thinks about quiet, intense Cassian sipping his coffee in Chirrut’s dance studio, and this surly, sulking teenager stretched out beside her on this unseasonably sun-warmed hilltop, and wonders how it feels. To be children who come from nothing, every step you take at odds with the world’s expectations, and to push yourself toward becomingeverything.A sequel to "Agape." In which Jyn Erso figures out a thing or three about passion.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As previously observed, I don't imagine you can write a "Yuri on Ice" homage-style AU and name one piece "Agape" without following through with an "Eros." ;-) Apologies in advance for any & all figure skating mistakes!

Jyn, by virtue of upbringing, profession, and preference, is no stranger to beautiful men. She knows girls – and boys – who can and do write poetry to the angle of Bodhi Rook’s cheekbone when a spotlight swallows his shadow on the ice. They’re the same dreamers who hang around Chirrut’s studio, feigning an interest in Adult Beginner Ballet II to cover their far more obvious interest in Chirrut’s still-tight abdominals, to say nothing of the would-be Habs WAGs plotting day and night to seduce Chirrut’s husband.

 

Jyn is – if possible to be such a thing – accustomed to beautiful men. She’s less accustomed, however, to the statistical analysis of their sex appeal.

 

“There is a sixty percent chance that Bodhi Rook’s erotic step sequence in the first half of his short program will significantly sway audience attention in his favor.”

 

Jyn opens her mouth. Closes it again. “You literally just made that up on the spot.”

 

The lanky youth, topped with silver-bleached hair, tilts a haughtily expressionless face toward her, and actually huffs. It sounds like a baby predecessor to Cassian’s trademark Disappointment Sound, which would be kind of cute in any context but this one. “I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand the formula,” says Baby Bleached Cassian, “but – ”

 

He’s interrupted by the steaming red bean bun Baze stuffs into the boy’s mouth. “Eat now,” Baze orders, stomping through his husband’s studio, hockey kit slung over one shoulder, sweet-smelling bakery bag cradled in the opposite arm. “Fight later.” He delivers a perfunctory kiss to the cheek of a beaming Chirrut – who’s tending a tea kettle in the corner kitchenette, feigning oblivion to squabbling students – and begins unloading the bag’s contents on the countertop.

 

“Baze is right.” Original Flavor Cassian, sipping coffee on Chirrut’s ancient, lumpy couch, looks suspiciously like he’s smiling into his mug. “You’ll both need your strength on the ice later today.”

 

“Cassian!” Baby Bleached Cassian looks affronted at being lumped into the same category as the girl whose ears he’s been filling with off-putting sex and skating statistics for Jyn-forgets-how-long, but definitely longer than necessary. Only he’s still gagged with a mouthful of steamed bun, so it comes out sounding more like “Caff-fee-ib!”

 

Jyn snorts. Original Flavor Cassian’s – her _coach_ Cassian’s – gaze flicks toward the sound, pinning her in place. “Jyn. I see you’ve met Kei in the flesh at last.”

 

Baby Bleached Cassian – Kei – swallowing red bean paste with all the dignity he can muster, draws his lanky height taller still. “I am making my senior debut this season. Cassian was my choreographer.”

 

“I know.” Jyn reaches for the remains of the boy’s abandoned red bean bun. Without looking up from the kitchen counter, Baze slaps her hand aside. “No stealing. There’s more in the pastry bag.”

 

Chirrut redirects his grin over a porcelain tea service. “Baze Malbus, the most fair-minded Hab ever to take the ice. I knew I married this man for a reason.”

 

Baze snorts, but the look he turns on his husband is the most cow-eyed expression Jyn’s ever seen. Jyn, watching them, makes accidental eye contact with Kei, who appears perturbed at this blatant display of besotted marital bliss. It’s probably the first emotion – the first anything, really – they’ve agreed on in their entire brief, unfortunate acquaintance.

 

Then Cassian says, “You two, go start your warm-ups.”

 

Kei casts a horrified look at Jyn. “Together?”

 

Jyn would be offended, only she’s pretty sure her expression mirrors Kei’s perfectly in that moment.

 

“In the dance studio, the two of you favor such uniquely different movements, such complementary strengths,” Chirrut remarks, pouring tea. “I thought it might benefit you both to train together from time to time. I suggested as much to your coach, who very wisely agreed.”

 

Betrayal widens Kei’s long dark eyes, parting his haughty mouth. “Cassian,” he babbles, “I have told you before, your sense of humor is not terribly –”

 

“Chirrut is not joking.” Cassian sips serenely at his coffee. “And neither am I.”

 

Jyn, cutting right to the chase, stomps toward him. “We were supposed to go over new choreo today!”

 

Cassian’s eyes lift. She’s bent over him, all aggression, feet splayed and knees knocking against his. Watching him watch her, she feels something hot uncoil inside her, skittering itchy beneath her skin.

 

“We will,” says Cassian, firm and soft all at once. She’s never known how to read the shape of emotion in his eyes, but the occasional quietude that sneaks into his voice never fails to knock her ever so gently off-kilter. Her shoulders relax, fractionally.

 

“After you and Kei finish your warm-ups, of course.”

 

Cassian probably won’t want to be Jyn’s coach anymore if she kicks him in the kneecaps. Still, the temptation remains considerable.

 

*

 

Outside, they’re cursed with a freakish balmy, pleasant day: the sun brightening blue sky that oversees temperatures only just beginning to contain that windy nip of a proper, snow-blown Canadian winter, but still warm enough to run through without dying immediately from exposure.

 

“There is less than a four percent chance that you will land a quad in competition,” observes Kei halfway through their fifth hill rep.

 

Jyn doesn’t give him the satisfaction of stumbling mid-jog. “Bodhi did, in his last program. So did you.” She bites her tongue on a horrible, childish urge to add, _besides,_ _Cassian’s famous for them, and he’s my coach right now, not yours, so there._

 

“You are not Bodhi Rook. And you are not me.”

 

“Well spotted,” pants Jyn.

 

“The statistics on successful quads in ladies’ figure skating do not favor you.”

 

“Great. Now I can’t actually tell if you’re trying to insult me, or female athletes as a whole.”

 

“I’m merely offering numerical facts.” Kei sounds pompously defensive, but also – of all things – a little hurt.

 

They reach the top of the hill, and pause for their stretches. Jyn, bending over one of her legs, watches her unwanted companion from the corner of her eye, and considers what she knows about Kei Tu. A foster kid born in Vancouver, he’s a coldly brilliant, flashy technician, as disdainful of other skaters as he is perfectionistic over his own routines. No one’s sure why a misanthropic orphan from British Columbia would take to Mexico’s legendary hero on the ice, of all token social attachments, but most chalk it up to a desire on Kei’s part for fame by association.

 

Jyn, watching Kei’s long silver bangs dip over the boy’s eyes, doesn’t buy it. “Hey,” she calls over the grass, impulsive. “Why Cassian?”

 

The bangs flick lower when Kei slides into a butterfly stretch. “I don’t understand the question.”

 

“You could get any celebrity skating champion to choreograph for you, if a celebrity’s what you’re after. Why were you so determined to get a routine out of Cassian, and no one else?”

 

Kei’s bowed head remains silent over his ankles, but Jyn sees the hitch in his shoulders before he speaks again. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”  
  
“Oh, it’s not.” Jyn’s not always honest, but when she is, she plays it in her favor. “Just thought you might like something positive to report back to Cassian when he asks whether we’ve learned anything from each other.”

 

“We haven’t.”

 

“I don’t know,” muses Jyn, resting her hands behind her head. She sinks backward to stretch out her thighs. “Today, I’ve learned that according to some statisticians, I have less than a four percent chance of landing a quad in competition.”

 

In her peripheral vision, Kei’s head snaps up from his butterfly, blinking owlishly.

 

“You ought to see what I can do with a triple axel, though,” Jyn informs the cloudless sky above them.

 

She hears the bustle of the city, distant. She hears wind whispering through the bare-branched trees. She thinks about quiet, intense Cassian sipping his coffee in Chirrut’s dance studio, and this surly, sulking teenager stretched out beside her on this unseasonably sun-warmed hilltop, and wonders how it feels. To be children who come from nothing, every step you take at odds with the world’s expectations, and to push yourself toward becoming _everything_.

 

Kei says, in a strange, quiet voice, “He changed how I thought, that’s all. Cassian. He showed me a different way to skate.”

 

“A different way?”

 

Kei says, with surprising fervor, “Cassian says that calculating every movement on the ice doesn’t mean you don’t care about inhabiting those movements. Numbers have meaning too. Math is life in action.” He pauses, repeats, “It doesn’t mean you don’t _care_.”

 

Jyn chews that over for a moment. “It doesn’t sound to me like he showed you a different way to skate. It sounds like he just showed you that your own way of skating wasn’t lesser than anyone else’s.”

 

Her gaze, still pointed toward the pale-stretched blue above, doesn’t catch Kei’s expression, but she swears she hears a note of unguarded approval in his voice when he says, “Your observations, Jyn Erso, are continually unexpected.”

 

*

 

Sinful. That’s the only word Jyn can think of for the routine Cassian’s choreographed for her short program, and she means that in every possible sense of the definition.

 

Exertion colors his cheeks, perspiration matting his dark hair when he finishes. “You got it?”

 

No. “That’s not a routine for me,” squawks Jyn. “That’s a routine for _Kei_.”

 

Kei could skate this choreo. Kei _has_ skated this choreo, or choreo cut from similar cloth. When you’re a technical genius fixated on perfection and impossible to embarrass, skating a bold, jump-heavy routine hinging on blatant sex appeal is an easy road to high scores.

 

“Of course it’s a routine for you.” Cassian sounds annoyed. “I had you in mind when I choreographed these movements.”

 

Those words contain implications that don’t bear over-analysis. “This isn’t the sort of thing I skate!”

 

“Precisely.” Cassian’s dark-eyed grin, still red-cheeked, cuts hot across the ice. Jyn wants, vaguely, to die. “You’re branching out.”

 

“Branching out into what, a _burlesque club_?”

 

His gaze still rests heavy on her. Eye contact feels like drowning, like some sort of terrible, hypnotic black hole. “Branching out into expressing _passion_ for something.”

 

Jyn’s throat works. She has no idea what to say to that.

 

“The choreography has erotic elements, yes,” Cassian continues, clinical, like he’s talking about a new color scheme for his kitchen, “but that’s not the point, Jyn. The point is why. The point is the story you’re conveying.”

 

“And what’s that?”

 

“Well.” He offers her a hand. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

 

*

 

They fall into habit-worn scheduling after that: warm-ups and conditioning with Kei, long lazy jogs up Mont Royal and hill sprints when the weather allows; hours on the ice under Cassian's inscrutable eye, trying to capture that elusive flicker of whatever he thought he saw in Jyn when he choreographed this stupid routine in the first place.

 

Every few nights, Cassian summons Jyn to his tidy little sublet, where he subjects her to endless reels of figure skating footage, men's and women's events alike, spanning past to present. Shara Bey, a gorgeous, dimpled dark horse from Guatemala, whom Jyn might yet face in the final, if either of them get that far. Leia Organa, a petite American spitfire, famous in equal measure for pulling perfectly-rotated jumps and giving shocking, no-nonsense interview. Even JJ Binks, an insufferable local boy, narrowly defeated by Bodhi last year, whom Jyn hates ten-percent for his massive ego, ten-percent for interrupting everyone he speaks to, and eighty-percent for that time he tried to cut in front of Chirrut in the poutine line at La Banquise. (Tried. Succeeded, not so much.) He skates smug and showy, and Jyn grinds her teeth the entire time.

 

Cassian, who cooks dinner for Jyn – largely, Jyn suspects, as a bribe to make her pay attention to the videos – fixes her a particularly hearty plate of chilaquiles that night, while she fantasizes about throttling JJ. Supper, when served, is all savory chorizo, clean notes of sour cream and cheese, and mouth-watering, fresh-made salsa. Jyn tries a bite, groans, and immediately accepts this wordless apology from Cassian.

 

"Skating is as much expression as technique," Cassian explains, forking tortillas on to his plate. "Competitive skaters may not tell stories in the same sense as ballerinas, or actors, but stories can still drive our choreography."

 

Jyn quits stuffing her face long enough to inquire, "That how you came up with mine?"

 

Cassian chuckles, bordering on self-deprecation, when he scoops up a bit of cheese with his thumb. "You know the story for your choreo, Jyn. A girl, brash and more beautiful than any in her kingdom, who seduces anyone she lays eyes on without even trying. Man or woman, girl or boy, all fall under her thrall. But none who seek to possess her can keep hold." In the flickering light of the muted television screen, his throat works, a long curving line through the dark. "She is her own."

 

The pause that wakes between them is a living thing, slipping worn beneath Jyn's skin. "Quite a girl," she says. Her chest feels tight.

 

Cassian brows furrow down toward his plate. "To skate this routine, and skate it well, you must consider your passions."

 

Jyn shrugs. "Never really had the luxury of those."

 

"Sure you do." Cassian's eyes flick toward her at last, turned up at the corners. His voice is very dry. "For example, you seem plenty passionate about the chilaquiles."

 

Jyn's glances at her plate, which has somehow emptied itself of the chilaquiles in question without her notice. Her stomach rumbles for more, even as her cheeks burn, jaw hinging open and shut like an indignant puppet's. "I am not skating that burlesque routine to – to thoughts of your _chilaquiles_!"

 

She wants to face-plant into the leftover salsa as soon as the words escape her tongue. Beside her, Cassian starts to shake. It takes Jyn four panicked seconds to realize he's laughing.

 

She slaps his arm. "It's not funny!" But the giddy, traitorous mirth bubbling up from her belly pinches her cheeks and curves her mouth, belying her.

 

His laughter feeds hers, and they lean into each other, giggling, plates abandoned on the edge of Cassian's coffee table. Jyn's tears leak into Cassian's soft, cashmere-clad shoulder. He's warm, close, voice a rumble against her collarbone when he manages through his mirth, "Jyn Erso. You really are quite a girl."

 

There's the pause, again, flush between their skin. Cassian's stubble scrapes Jyn's cheek. He smells like detergent, and kitchen spices, hard planes of muscle at work beneath her touch. They're so close. The pause waits, a road diverging in the eye of Jyn's mind.

 

Then Cassian coughs, collapsing the silence. "It's late."

 

Is it?

 

They detangle. Jyn's limbs feel adrift, restless, like too many days off the ice. Her fists curl, uncurl, curl again.

 

"Think about it," says Cassian. His eyes, careful and dark and opaque, are serious again. Jyn wants, nonsensically, to see them crinkle at the corners. "What drives you. Your passions."

 

Jyn quirks an eyebrow at him, heart thrumming _ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum_ against her ribs. "So I'll skate like a sexy chilaquiles plate then, yeah?"

 

She earns the satisfaction, at least, of seeing one side of his mouth curl upward. "Get some sleep, Jyn."

 

"Yeah." She scuffs a wool-socked toe along his floor. "All right."

 

"Good night."

 

"Good night, Cassian."

 

_Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum_ , whispers the heart inside her bones.

 

*

 

“With each successive attempt, your chances at landing that jump decrease due to continued physical exhaustion.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Would you like to know the percentages of –”

 

“No.”

 

“I would really recommend you at least listen to my calculations for –”

 

“No.”

 

“Well, now the percentage of falling on your next attempt has risen to –”

 

“Kei, either help me with this landing, or leave.”

 

Even at the rink’s center, through sweat-stung eyes, Jyn can make out Kei’s glare in the stands. Charming. Then he’s stomping down the creaky metal steps. “Fine. But you’d better listen to my analysis, then.”

 

Jyn blinks. She hadn’t actually expected the help, but now help is resentfully barreling toward her in the form of lanky, silver-locked teenager.

 

Even more surprisingly, Kei’s not a terrible tutor. He’s bossy and snippy and drips disdain, but his notes are actually useful. When Jyn, against all his carefully calculated odds, pulls off one sloppy, wobbly quad, she just about hugs him.

 

“That looked atrocious,” says Kei, frowning, “and you lacked the proper rotation. Your chances of landing another in competition are –”

 

She skates over to the rink’s edge, and claps him hard on the shoulder. “Kei. Let’s go for hot cocoa.”

 

He keeps frowning, but says, very grudgingly, “I enjoy cocoa.”

 

*

 

Jyn's half asleep one night, before realization jerks her conscious again. Her fingers scrape through her hair, knees twitching and buckling to phantom jumps on the ice that inevitably fail. Her heart rattles hard enough to bruise her insides. _The odds of landing a quad in competition –_

 

No.

 

_What passions drive you?_

 

Jyn's out of bed before her brain catches up to her feet, but by then, she's toeing on socks and shrugging into a parka. She has no idea what time it is, hasn't checked phone or wall clock, and can't bring herself to care.

 

Chirrut keeps odd, late hours at the studio. She's heard Baze grumble about them often enough to remember.

 

The dance teacher's little smile when he opens the studio door tugs wordlessly at Jyn’s restless limbs, at the ache of her rattling heart. "I wondered when you might come," says Chirrut. "Better late than never."

 

She swallows, following him inside. "How did you know?"

 

"I'm told I'm an observant man." Cheerfully, he sets out a pair of tea cups for them. "I suspect it's to flatter my blindness, but hear something long enough, and you might believe it's true. Now, what did you wish to ask?"

 

Her face feels like it's on fire. "How do you stay your own person and also –" She swallows. "Also care about someone else?"

 

Chirrut's mouth curves wide. "Anyone specific?"

 

"No," says Jyn, probably too quickly. This is terrible. This is having The Talk with her father when she turned thirteen all over again. "No, I'm just trying to figure something out. For my routine."

 

"For your routine," echoes Chirrut, teeth bright. "Of course."

 

"It's supposed to be about passion," Jyn mumbles at her untouched tea cup. "I just thought you might know. Because."

 

"Because I'm old, and rather famously married?"

 

"You're not that old."

 

"No, I suppose not, for anyone who's not a dancer." Chirrut taps fingers against the side of his cup, looking thoughtful. "But a dancer is what I was, and what I am, still, and what I will always be. And you wish to know, amidst all that, what part Baze plays."

 

Jyn says nothing, but she hunches a little closer around her teacup.

 

Chirrut understands. "There's grace, in independence. But there's grace, also, in holding another inside your heart. The two are not mutually exclusive. If you watched some of my performances, after my marriage, perhaps you'd see."

 

Jyn has. There’s this one YouTube video, sought and watched at least half a dozen times by anyone who’s ever studied under Chirrut. It’s from his touring days in Montreal, after years in the Hong Kong Ballet, dipping his toes into modern dance. He’s playing a romantic lead, the prince of the production, and most of his moments on stage are shared, but there’s this one solo: a single spotlight on a black box stage coloring Chirrut gold, shirt shucked and skin glowing over sharp-edged bone and tight-wound muscle, sightless eyes fixed on something he alone can recognize. Footage rolls, and his arms articulate desire, out-turned arches of his feet laying conquest to the stage, to the audience, to every beating heart in the room. It’s seduction. It’s self-possession. It’s freedom.

 

It’s also the first live performance Chirrut gave after meeting Baze. Jyn doesn’t know anyone who can watch that video dry-eyed.

 

Chirrut must realize what she's thinking about, because he nods once, slow. "Some parts of life, some ways of caring, are easier expressed and understood through motion than words." The smile overtakes his face again. "But that's something you of all people would understand, Jyn Erso."

 

Chirrut's teacup warms the space between Jyn's palms. "I think maybe I do, now." She hesitates. "Can you – "

 

Chirrut rolls his neck, stretching his arms out long. "What's the witching hour for, if not a bit of ballet? Come along, then."

 

Jyn, smiling at nothing in particular, toes out of her socks and goes to fetch her slippers.

 

*

 

Competition day arrives.

 

Jyn nods absently at her well-wishers: the high-five from Baze – “Good luck, little sister” – who gruffly promises smoked meat sandwiches at Schwartz’s, regardless of who wins or loses; a kiss to the crown from Chirrut, who says nothing at all, but doesn’t especially need to; a lingering hug from Bodhi, fresh off a plane from Heathrow, already nervous and bright-eyed and ready to defend the men’s title.

 

Even Kei appears, scowling at the floor and scuffing one of his boots along the tarp. “I’ll be here for you, Jyn,” he tells the tarp. Then he looks up and adds, mulish, “Cassian said I had to.”

 

Jyn hides the fierce, upward twist of her mouth. In some ways, Kei’s petulance feels like the best luck of all. Constancy has its comforts.

 

In the minutes before her first short program, Cassian himself catches Jyn’s elbow, grip soft, head bent toward hers, dark gaze inescapable. His lips part, throat working.

 

Before he can speak, the fingers of Jyn’s free hand clamp down on the blue of his parka sleeve. “Are you with me?”

 

He doesn’t have to ask what she means. He just nods, once, and says with that occasional, arresting quietude of his: “All the way.”

 

She hangs on to his sleeve until the last possible second. He doesn’t comment. And his fingers don’t fall from her elbow until hers release him.

 

Then she’s gliding on to the ice, her name blaring out to the audience. Her skates pause at the center, eyes shut, arms lifted. The music begins.

 

Her mind summons images in motion, like a hazy Hollywood redux of one of Cassian’s video reels: Bodhi’s perfect quad, last year, surprised elation bright in his eyes. Kei, the numbers whirling through his head and off his tongue, the beautiful precision of his technique. Chirrut, ten years younger, golden-skinned beneath that single spotlight in a pitch-dark theater, limbs whirling bright through the black like a promise.

 

And Cassian. Cassian, Cassian, Cassian, the name and thought and scent of him a staccato rhythm beneath Jyn’s sternum.

 

She’s flying through her routine, but she’s no longer inside the rink.

 

_A girl, brash and more beautiful than any in her kingdom. None who seek to possess her can keep hold._

 

The camera in Jyn’s mind flickers toward the crinkles at the corners of Cassian’s eyes. The angles of his cheeks and the shape of his mouth, pictured in technicolor.

 

_She is her own._

 

Ah, thinks Jyn – distant, tilting into a spin – but being her own means that brash, beautiful girl is also free to give herself. Her mind, her choice, body and soul and the _ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum_ straining under her bones.

 

One jump, then another. The crowd cheers.

 

A step sequence. Jyn’s mind maps the girl’s road through the kingdom, toward the castle, and the prince inside, and this: his lashes brushing her cheek when his lips drop to the corner of her mouth, her hands curling into dark hair while he charts a course from the hollow beneath her ear to the pulse point at her wrist. Inside her head, she maps her body, the flow of her blood and breath in sync with a lover’s.

 

Outside her head, there’s a triple-axel.

 

Eyes dark, teeth bright, her fingernails scraping possession down his back. _I am mine, and you are yours, but I am also yours, and you are also mine._

 

Her feet give, just once. The quad, unfurled. There’s a stumble, a fall. Her palm scrapes the ice. The announcer says something she can’t hear, tight-voiced, but she’s already moving, the camera rolling again, pieces of story still there to be told, kingdom still undiscovered, girl still brash, still beautiful.

 

Lutz jump, landed. Sit spin.

 

Dark head dipping sweat-mussed toward hers. Teeth at her neck. Stubble scraping her cheek, and gasped warmth waiting in both their mouths: yours mine ours, ours, ours.

 

And then it’s over. She pants, arms wrapped like her imagined lover’s round her shoulders, fingers held aloft, head tipped to the sky. The music’s been replaced by a dull roar, and it takes her a moment to realize it’s the crowd, on their feet.

 

She breathes it in, for a minute, arms splayed, eyes shut, blood hot in her veins. Then her skates are carrying her toward the kiss-and-cry. Her eyes, when they open, blur.

 

She falls into Cassian, or Cassian falls into her, she’s not sure which. Her arms clutch at that familiar blue parka, thumbs hooking into the soft fur of its hood. They’re close enough to kiss, foreheads bridged, blinking slowly against each other. A flash of light. Someone snapping a photo.

 

“Hey,” he rasps against her jaw. “I have to say, I think that’s the sexiest chilaquiles plate I’ve ever seen on skates.”

 

Jyn can’t help it. She laughs, so hard she could cry, shoving at him, then reeling him back in by his hood, unable to stop holding him, limbs sprawled, unwilling to detangle from his warmth.

 

Tomorrow, there will be more. The long program still looming ahead, rounds and rounds of qualifiers left before her. But between their bodies, Cassian’s fingers loop through hers like a promise, of days to come, of fights to win, long hours on the ice and in the dance studio giving way to triumph born from passion, from freedom. It’s enough, for Jyn, in the inch of this moment, pressed flush against Cassian’s chest. It’s more than enough.


End file.
